[Tech] Graphics Cards

Nanor

Nanor

Well-Known Member
I haven't been paying much attention to graphics cards as of late. This is kind of a relief as the only reason I had to was because I kept breaking my card on a yearly basis. My Radeon HD 4870 has lasted me a mega 3.5 years! It's still going too but I've started to notice some artifacts and I figure now is a pretty decent time for an upgrade.

So what's good? I've had my eye on a Radeon 7870. It's pretty cheap at ~£150 and the 4870 has served me so well and still holds up admirably to current gen games so I might get that. I've been looking around at the similarly priced Geforce GTX 660. I'm assuming, perhaps erroneously, that similar price means similar speed. If that's the case I probably will go for the 7870 but I want your input first.

I'd expect to buy sometime around Christmas but I'd be willing to hold off if something better is going to come on the market for ~£200 or there's an expected price drop for better cards.
 
Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
If you're starting to get artefacts - take it out and clean it. Dust bunnies in the heat sink may be causing heat spots which cause artefacts.

You should definitely clean it out and check the cooling before you spend any money.
 
Nanor

Nanor

Well-Known Member
That might keep me going for a month or two though I expect I will buy a new graphics card soon.
 
Iron_fist

Iron_fist

Super Moderator
Staff member
As Haven says, give the heatsink a good clean, see what happens!

I have had the 7870 in my machine for about 18 months now, It's pretty happy running 2 1920x1200 monitors over Display port and has handled everything I've thrown at it so far quite nicely.
That said, I hear the new Nvidia cards are awesome.

Spicy recommends the 760 at £180 in his gaming PC guide specifically: http://www.dabs.com/products/msi-geforce-gtx-760-1006mhz-2gb-pci-express-3-0-hdmi-oc-8SY6.html

Be Aware! if you run multiple monitors on different outputs ( DVI + Displayport) you'll get a roll on the monitor as the timings on DVI, HDMI and Display Port are all different at least this was the problem I ran into on my card.
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
Iron_fist said:
Be Aware! if you run multiple monitors on different outputs ( DVI + Displayport) you'll get a roll on the monitor as the timings on DVI, HDMI and Display Port are all different at least this was the problem I ran into on my card.
Click to expand...

By roll, he means you'll get a refresh/ scan line (like you see on monitors when they're being filmed with bad camera settings) I had this too with the Radeon 6950 card and 3 monitor setup. I don't get that issue on the nVidia card with 4 screens.
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Right, okay. I hadn't realised. Good to know, though. My currently preferred monitor (Dell G2410 I believe) only does DVI and VGA so if I added one then the lack of another DVI port would be a problem...
 
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